PERU | Insecurity ‘misperceived’. Interior minister Walter Albán issued a plea on 16 June for the public not to exaggerate the current degree of insecurity in Peru. In statements to the official newspaper El Peruano he noted that while opinion surveys showed up to 88% of the public naming insecurity as their main concern, victimisation surveys by Inei, the national statistical institute, showed the actual risk at 35.5%. ‘In no other country,’ he said, ‘is the gap between [the two] so great. Something is going on.’ he did accept, though, that data on extortion ‘call for a more careful review…

The government of President Nicolás Maduro has insistently portrayed the wave of protest actions launched by the opposition earlier this year as a ‘continuing coup attempt’, while the latter have maintained that they were initially provoked by public insecurity, rampant inflation and the widespread shortage of essential goods, which escalated in response to the government’s brutal repression — though the most radical members of the opposition have said that they intend to continue until the Maduro government collapses. Both sides have been marshalling figures (often the same ones with differing slants) in support of their cases. The protests which began…